Smart Speaker Shipments

Analyst firm Canalys says that global smart speaker

shipments grew 137 percent year over year in the third

quarter, reaching 19.7 million units. That was up from

less than half that figure (8.3 million) a year ago.

Roughly 75 million devices by year-end. The firm has

projected 75 million devices “for the whole of 2018.” It’s

not entirely clear whether this is shipments or an estimate

of the installed base of smart speaker owners. Previously,

Canalys projected global smart speaker ownership would

reach 100 million by the end of the year — so it’s likely a

downward revision of that earlier estimate.

Canalys also said that Amazon had reclaimed the top

position after Google had overtaken it for the previous

two quarters.

“Riding on the success of its Prime Day,” the report said,

“Amazon shipped 6.3 million Echo smart speakers in Q3,

reclaiming the top spot after two quarters of playing second

fiddle to Google. This quarter, Google shipped 5.9 million

units, putting it just behind Amazon.”

Amazon has 75 percent of the market. According to Canalys,

Amazon now has a nearly 75 percent market share to

Google’s almost 25, with Chinese companies filling the

remaining less than 1 percent. The world’s three largest

markets for smart speakers are the U.S., China and the UK,

in that order.

It should be noted that there have been meaningful differences

in some of the analyst firms’ estimates of market size and market

share in the past. One recent illustration of that is Consumer

Intelligence Research Partners’ (CIRP) assertion that U.S. smart

speaker growth has started to level off. Some of these differences

may be due to methodology; Canalys tracks global device

shipments, CIRP is using U.S. consumer sampling.